


Toast

by Ccroquette



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Angst, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:08:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ccroquette/pseuds/Ccroquette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ivan drinks alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toast

By the time everything is finally over, it’s dark, and Ivan staggers outside into the cold. Another meeting, done with. Another day of numbers that won’t add up and names that won’t come home. Another great plan unfulfilled, and he’s hurting for it because he has _failed_ and his boss does not tolerate failures.

 

He takes a deep breath of the freezing air - it catches before it reaches his lungs, his throat is raw and ragged - and knows the cold will help to ease the ache, to take away the pain of countless wounds. The snow is thick, here, and he allows himself to collapse into it, falling backwards with arms and legs outstretched, vodka in hand. The chill seeps through his coat and scarf and gloves, and maybe he should worry that it will kill him, but he knows it won’t. It can’t. It can only numb the sting of a multitude of bruises, left by the world and the system and the people and his boss...

 

He lifts the vodka bottle to his lips, hastening the numbness. The alcohol slides down his throat and the stars sparkle above him, so far above, and for a moment he loses himself in the little points of light, in a shining starlit world where there are no five-year-plans, no Purges, no Parties, where for a moment the future is as benevolent and lustrous as the stars, until the cold seeps in again, and the pain brings him back to Earth.

 

He lies in the snow, drinking and staring at the sky, and wonders where it all went wrong.

 

He’s only ever tried to help them, to give them what they want and what they need and make a way for them in the world, but it never works. Never. He built them an Empire and they tore it down and now there’s _this_ , this damnable USSR, this broken _soyuz_ , and he can’t get rid of it for them because he isn’t that strong anymore. He is Russia and they are Russia and when they are tortured he bruises and bleeds and starves along with them. He’s battered to hell just like his people, and there’s nothing to be done.

 

He wonders if they would still have wanted this, all those years ago, if they knew what was going to happen, if they knew that _this_ was where their dream of a perfect world would lead them.

 

And maybe he should cry, but Ivan smiles instead and raises his bottle of vodka to the stars. In the night the angry black-and-blue encircling his wrists looks like nothing more than ordinary shadow, and he decides the occasion calls for a toast.

 

“ _Ya p'yu za razeryonniy dom_ ,” he whispers, reciting to the frozen darkness, “ _Za zluyu zhizn' moyu_ ….”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Translation and note:
> 
> Ivan’s toast is the first two lines from the poem “Posledniy Tost” (“The Last Toast”) by Anna Akhmatova, roughly:
> 
> I’m drinking to my ravaged home,  
> My life’s ill-fated path  
> To loneliness that stays with us,  
> To you, I raise my glass  
> To lies on lips that lied to me,  
> To cold and deadened eyes  
> To a world so full of cruelty,  
> To God’s not saving us


End file.
